The Best Is Yet to Come Lillias White and Billy Stritch are among the Broadway veterans in this revue celebrating the music of Cy Coleman at the 59E59 Theaters.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

A little bit of Las Vegas in the 1960s has splashed down Off Broadway. “The Best Is Yet to Come: The Music of Cy Coleman,” a finger-snapping, hard-charging, small-scale but still shiny-looking revue, has taken up residence at the 59E59 Theaters, becoming the latest cultural artifact seemingly spawned by the influential “Mad Men” television series. A Broadway composer whose glory years began in the heyday of the Rat Pack, Coleman can be seen on the cover of the program in a sleek suit, posing coolly like an honorary member of that informal fraternity.

Coleman, who died in 2004, had a long and diverse career as a theater composer, proving an adept collaborator with many different lyricists: Carolyn Leigh, with whom he wrote the pop hits “Witchcraft” and the revue’s title song before moving to Broadway with the Lucille Ball vehicle “Wildcat” and “Little Me”; Dorothy Fields on “Sweet Charity” and “Seesaw”; Betty Comden and Adolph Green on “On the Twentieth Century” and “The Will Rogers Follies.” For the Tony-laureled film-noir spoof “City of Angels,” Coleman’s writing partner was David Zippel, who devised and directed the new revue, originally seen at the Rubicon Theater Company in Ventura, Calif.

It’s not a songwriting career that makes for easy anthologizing. Mr. Zippel and Billy Stritch, the graceful musical director who also presides at the piano and occasionally adds his voice to the mix, have settled on a collection emphasizing the tangles and trials of love and lust that were explored in the Coleman songbook, from the hushed romanticism of “You Fascinate Me So” and “It Amazes Me” to the more sour and cynical outpourings of heartbroken dames, dance-hall girls and prostitutes. The production boasts a fine cast of singers, Broadway veterans of different generations: Lillias White, Howard McGillin, Rachel York, Sally Mayes and the young David Burnham.

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Rachel York accompanied by Billy Stritch, who was also the musical director of the tribute to the composer Cy Coleman.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Despite the variety of Coleman’s music and subject matter, “The Best Is Yet to Come” tends to overdose on overbearing crescendos and throbby interpretations of the songs that would better suit a larger theater. Sitting in the fifth row, I often felt pinned to the back of my seat by the show’s need to transform Coleman’s coolly swinging, jazz-inflected compositions into something hotly theatrical. The least aggressive interpretations — Mr. Stritch’s elegant, wistful performances of “It Amazes Me” and “Some Kind of Music,” for instance — came as a needed balm amid the general brassiness of much of the rest. (I can’t complain about the ample band, however: eight musicians including Mr. Stritch, talented and well drilled.)

The lushly beautiful Ms. York has a gorgeous voice, and she begins the sultry ballad “Come Summer” with a becoming delicacy. But it unhappily gives way to an overwrought intensity that tends to obliterate the feeling in the song. She is far more appealing in a silkier register performing the duet “Only the Rest of My Life” with Mr. Burnham, from an unproduced musical (about Napoleon and Josephine!) Mr. Zippel was working on with Coleman at the time of his death.

Mr. Burnham, with dimpled chin and soap-operatic good looks, does creditably by the Sinatra standard “Witchcraft” and the swinging “I’ve Got Your Number” from “Little Me.” He’s not Sinatra, or even Dean Martin — who is? — but he emulates their smooth, seductive style, adding his own twinkly warmth to the mixture.

The title song from “Little Me” is among the evening’s highlights, as performed with bouncy, affectionate rapport by Ms. White and Mr. Stritch, in an arrangement that gives Leigh’s delicious lyrics their due. (The head microphones sometimes muddy the sound mix; Mr. Stritch fares best at the piano with his traditional mike.) Earlier, in resplendent showstopper mode, Ms. White scorched the room with “The Oldest Profession,” the song that helped win her a Tony Award for “The Life,” the 1997 musical about (ugh) prostitution. Ms. White’s earthy humor and soulful, stinging voice are as potent a combination as ever, but I find the lyrics (by Ira Gasman) unhappily repellent.

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Excerpt: 'The Best Is Yet to Come'

Lillias White sings "The Oldest Profession" from the musical "The Life" as part of "The Best is Yet to Come: The Music of Cy Coleman" at 59E59 Theaters. (Video courtesy of the production.)

Ms. Mayes earns her torchy moment in the spotlight on “With Every Breath I Take,” an outstanding ballad from “City of Angels.” Her vocal luster may be a little time-dimmed, but she remains a smart interpreter who can efficiently deliver the humor in a song like “Nobody Does It Like Me,” from “Seesaw,” a luckless lover’s comic lament. Mr. McGillin, the famously long-playing mask wearer in “Phantom of the Opera,” possesses a firm tenor and an air of gallantry that gives an ardent glow to the ballad “I’d Give the World,” another song from the unseen Napoleon musical. But he could afford to sell it a little less powerfully.

Actually, the show as a whole could benefit from a softer sell. (Even the bandstand set, by Douglas W. Schmidt, is a little too sparkly.) Coleman’s music has plenty of style and flash of its own. It’s not really necessary to sock it to us with quite so much insistence.